


ordinary world

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Music, Fade to Black, Inspired by HYDE, Inspired by Music, M/M, Making Out, Musicians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 19:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19116418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Out, out, damned words, Noctis thinks, and he comes within a hair’s breadth of actually singing that thought out loud, too.





	ordinary world

**Author's Note:**

> Song's in the fic. Go watch the video. :)

There’s a breath in the world, just the one, that isn’t his: the breath that shivers in the darkness beyond this stage and its beams that are holding him up where he’s standing. Beyond the lines of this grand piano: the curves of its body, and the tight parallels of the strings, and the gently yellowed alignment of the white keys. Beyond this pool of hazy light, and the smoke that curls up from a single candle, burning down to a pool of dark blue wax and the long tendril-shape of its wick, dissolving into the breath.

And he knows them, he can feel them, he can hear them, murmuring in anticipation. A tiny venue that should never have been able to hold a hundred souls, and that number doesn’t include the people who run the venue itself, who tend to those same hundred souls. The bartender, who’s standing in the only other source of light that he can see, and that faint light collects in the lenses of that pair of ever-present spectacles. The women at the door, who only look slender and fledgling, as a collective. The manager of this venue, stern-faced and deeply, fearfully inked -- feather-shapes trailing up his arms, and the head of the fierce raptor-bird over his heart.

The people milling around backstage whose footsteps he can hear; the band gone still and silent and waiting. 

They’re far more patient than he is, and they maybe indulge him and his thoughts too much, and he’s grateful they’re there, grateful for the chance to empty all those same thoughts out of his own mind, out of the noise that sometimes builds and builds to painful depths between his own ears --

Speaking of which. Outlet. Breath, to let it all out -- he fills his lungs, he fills the billowing tails of his coat is what it feels like, and he lets the words come out of him, like he’s been holding them trapped and now it’s time to -- release.

Out, out, damned words, he thinks, and he comes within a hair’s breadth of actually singing that thought out loud, too.

But no -- all that falls out of him are the lyrics, the actual words that someone else had written, that someone else had set to this melancholy storm of a melody -- and he plays that melody, now, imperceptibly as he can make it so that it can rise, skirling, and be a shock when he finally bears down onto the keys with the weight of the words, the weight of his breaths, end to end in black and white and he doesn’t feel the exertion, the pull of gravity, the push of his muscles.

The piano is -- him, too, or the parts of him that respond to more than just the words of the song or the measures into which its chords fall. The piano is the weight he carries around with him, and maybe it’s not so heavy now because he can still fetch that thought of -- _oh this is easy_ , finding middle C for the first time and then creating a little trill and run of notes all by himself, completely untrained, first day first hour of his music lessons and the shadow of his mother’s slow-burn smile, like a candle flickering in the first moments of the match, of its fiery touch pulling away.

Just as he remembers to throw himself into this song, into this here and now, and he lets his own voice spiral away from him. Control. He still has to control it and yet -- the words tear at his throat as he lets them out one by one, breath by breath, into the rising swell of the crowd as it falls into his rhythm, too. As he takes control of all those hundred souls. Note by note and rest by rest and then -- he lets himself smile because he knows the words by heart and he knows the melody by heart and -- he knows what he’s going to do, next.

That doesn’t always happen to him.

Just as he hears the murmuring voices beyond the stage, rising in the pre-chorus of the song: he stops dead.

He rises to his feet and takes his hands off the keyboard and he breathes, one, two.

Before leaning in to the candle and blowing it out, and with a too-close-overhead thump the small vague spotlight that had been on him goes dark, too.

Murmurs nearby, the audience stirring, and he can almost tell apart the voices that are wondering from the voices that are anticipating, because he can count the number of times he’s performed this song on his own two hands, and he’s never done the same thing twice, in this silent interval, this stolen bridge.

He knows what to do, here, now, and -- he takes the breath he needs, and he’s emptying himself out, he hopes. Scattering the fearful voices that skitter and outstay their welcome, on the outskirts of his mind. Spilling them all out as he shouts-sings:

[ _Every world is my world -- I will learn to survive!_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9koQo3i6ZLI)

Nothing but him, no one to back him up or even to accompany him.

Just him and his voice in the darkness, rising and rising and soon -- not alone.

Other voices taking up the last lines of the song with him, and he thinks he recognizes the bartender, smooth-rasp lilt. Female voices that are distant and yet powerful. And it builds and it builds until he thinks he can hear more than a hundred voices, until he feels like all the whispers in his head must be singing and that’s a change, that’s almost a relief because it means they’re not tearing at him, jagged edges of nervousness, the kinds of fear he knows like different swords, different kinds of cutting, all left in him somehow --

Lights coming on in the venue, scattered stars -- bright white bits and pieces of smartphone-flashes, and it lets him catch parts of people, parts of expressions, parts of the song illuminated in enraptured eyes.

He adds his own part of that light, on the very last line, on the very last word: weight of the lighter that had been in his pocket all along, stashed away for just this moment, the only thing he can hold on to since he hasn’t even been singing with a mic in hand.

Flick of its wheel that catches, a spark that bounces into the shadows of the stage. Fuel igniting. Smell of it that’s all sharp edges -- followed by the sweeter scent of the flame, the blue heart of it and the small intensity of the yellow.

He holds that flame up near his own face, and hopes it’s enough to illuminate the smile he’s wearing.

What does he look like, in this moment, in the instant before his thumb catches the edge of a cramp and he nearly drops the lighter -- which means its small flame goes out, and he -- he crashes back into himself.

Stumbling over the half-familiar stage, the cables and the legs of the piano, to find the mic stand and whisper: “Thank you, everyone.”

And -- there are footsteps gaining on him. A hand catching at his wrist, and in this darkness that entirely familiar and entirely different pattern of rough patches, of calluses, but he doesn’t actually need to feel that to know who this is.

It’s the warmth that radiates from that skin that he knows, that he feels. It might as well be a gravitational pull; it might as well be attraction that he understands in his actual skin and bones. It might as well be the air that fills his lungs, breath by breath that slowly catches, erratic, like his pulse is speeding up and slowing down.

His body and its rhythms know this touch and the person it belongs to, and -- skips, to follow. Like tiny gaps on a sound-groove, like tiny breaks in magnetic tape, like tiny blank pits in a laser-etched disc.

He’s blinded, at last, but the light he’s left on in the corner of his dressing room is a small dim camp-lantern, not even something he should be carrying around except that his mother had carried it to each and every one of her own performances, and had made such a small quiet to-do of her handing it over to him, at the beginning of this tour.

Concerts in basements where she’d been performing beneath glittering chandeliers, beneath crystal-fall facets. The smell of sawdust, and crumbling bricks, and too many souls packed skin-to-skin in the shadows.

Speaking of which -- shadows, here, too, more comforting for the golden wash of faint light -- shadows captured on skin, too, in the tiny ragged edges of freckles, on the old smoothed lines of scars.

Violet-blue eyes gone dark and wide at the same time, too close, not close enough -- and finally he remembers how to move without being in the proximity of eighty-eight keys -- his hands moving to catch at shoulder and arm and gently, gently, pulling in -- as one might coax, as one might ask, into a soft and sweet collision.

Into the shadow of a smile, lopsided, gleam on faint amusement and -- whatever else is there, whatever else is in those eyes that he can’t name or sing about -- he can only feel it, and catch it as he does his breath, in the last instant before the kiss.

And oh, it shouldn’t be gratifying, when -- they break apart and the first thing he hears is: “Can we? Will you?”

He blinks, once. Hard-punched breath out of his lungs. “Prompto.”

“Yeah. I’m asking. Can we? Noct?”

Images flashing, as sharp and sweet and gorgeous as songs he’s never learned and never played: one after another in his mind’s eye, playing him, and he’s the song created by these freckled hands.

“Yeah,” he says, breathless and gratified already, a different kind of shaking running through him -- a different kind of music already catching in his lungs, in his mouth --

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/) \-- or, hey, if Tumblr becomes too rotten and we can't talk there any more, there's always Twitter, where I am @ninemoons42.


End file.
